What Is An SEO Strategy: 9 Important Steps To Create A Winning SEO Strategy

What SEO Can Do For Your Website & Overall Business?

In addition to increased website visibility and traffic, search engine optimization also helps improve your brand awareness and voice. The brand authority then results in increased brand trust, which finally results in brand loyalty. 

Other benefits of SEO include

• Build Your Brand
• Leverages Social Sharing & Helps People Find Your Website
• Boosts Your Credibility, Visibility & Authority
• Attracts Relevant Traffic With High Conversion Potential
• It Is a very Cost-Effective & Measurable Marketing Strategy 
• Lets Each Page On Your Website Become An Entry Point For Potential Customers.

Here are some critical SEO statistics 

• The worldwide SEO services market has grown from $62.75 billion in 2022 to $74.76 billion in 2023 at 19.1% CAGR. [Source: The Business Research Company]
• Search engine optimization drives more than 10x organic traffic than organic social media. [Source: BrightEdge]
• B2B businesses produce twice as many sales using SEO than any other way. [Source: BrightEdge]
• According to Statista, As of January 2023, Google controls 84.7% of the worldwide search engine market share, while Bing around 8.85%, and in third place, at 3.9% [Source: Statista].

Brief Overview of Types of SEO

Before we start talking about how to create an SEO strategy with your SEO agency, it’s essential that you also know the different types of SEO practices your company can go for so that you choose the best type of B2B SEO strategy to drive the desired result out of your SEO strategies. Here are the different SEO types you will come across:

Other than these SEO types, one more SEO approach has gained traction - Mobile SEO. With more and more people spending their time on their mobile devices or tablets, it has become imperative for businesses to have their websites designed to fit different screen sizes & types. But many aren’t following this trend, which is when over 95% of internet surfers use mobile devices to explore the web, and 58.33% of web traffic comes from mobile devices. So why lose such great numbers?

Mobile SEO ensures that you follow certain practices so that you can offer a fantastic experience to visitors of your mobile site. SEO providers must follow these key elements to have an effective Mobile SEO strategy:

• Create a Responsive Website
• Optimize the Meta descriptions, title tags, alt texts, and URLs for local SEO.
• Enhance Page Loading Speed
• Optimize content for the mobile experience, including content like headlines, copy, images/videos, forms, and call-to-actions.

1. Define Your Target Audience & Their Interests

In order to maximize your SEO strategies effort and to ensure you are being seen by the right audience, you need to know your customers. So look into questions like what are their pain points?What goes into their buying decisions, who they go for trusted sources of information, and more? Finding answers to these customer-centric questions helps create a buyer’s persona and ensures you combine the best SEO strategies that increase website traffic and convert leads to sales. Your SEO company must keep these critical elements in mind to determine your target audience:

• Your current visitors and customers
• Understand your competitors & their tactics
• Identify the potential demographics 
• Analyze the SERPS
• Use social media analytics

2. Conduct A SEO Competitor Analysis

Once your best SEO company settles on your business goal and target audience, the next step for building an SEO strategy is to conduct an SEO competitor analysis. It is the process of collecting and evaluating your competitor’s SEO strategies to make an informed decision. It helps you gauge what your competitors are doing, and after considering market trends, you can identify how you can create better SEO strategies than your competitors and outrank them. This is how you do SEO competitor analysis:

• Identify your potential competitors
• Gain a better understanding of their ranking keywords
• Analyze competitors’ content performance
• Analyze competitors’ presence on social media
• Select areas for improvement and opportunities

3. Create A List Of Keywords

The choice of Keywords and content are two of the most vital components when implementing SEO tips. Keywords show the search engine what your content is about, so how does it work for your SEO? Well, when a prospect types a query for something related to your business, your keywords are the tool that helps them find you online. But this works when you have done a good enough job of keyword optimization, and that’s how you get prominent rankings on search engines. Therefore, SEO providers will optimize your keywords as they make your content and business more visible in search engines. So to ensure you’re using the right keywords, use these points to optimize your keywords:

• Analyze current On-page SEO
• Find keywords for your site
• Use keyword research tools to dig deeper 
• Map your keywords, especially long-tail keywords
• Add keywords to your site, avoid keyword stuffing
• Don’t forget your target audience

4. Create SEO-friendly, Targeted Content

Content marketing is one of the integral parts of your SEO strategies as it propels your marketing efforts and brings a high volume of quality traffic to your website, which eventually converts visitors into leads and then sales. Your SEO company should strategize and properly integrate your content into your SEO strategies to grab your customers’ attention beyond the search results page of your websites. So once your ads get them to your site, high-quality content like blogs, web copies, or product descriptions increases your brand’s awareness, credibility, and revenue. So an effective way to have great strategies for SEO is to follow these content marketing strategies:

• Create & follow a content calendar
• Provide engaging, valuable content regularly
• Put together content that’s both relevant to readers and google
• Promote content on social media 
• Focus on personalization
• Track your metrics and tweak your strategy accordingly

5. Choose The Right Website Design & Layout

Usually; website designs are not considered an SEO strategy tactic which is where many marketers fail to maximize their SEO strategies’ efforts. Since your website is the window to your products and services and the first point of interaction with your potential customers, you need to work towards making a great first impression. It does not matter how amazingly you implement your online marketing strategies or how powerful your B2B SEO strategy is if your website is not designed to complement both of them. So keep these website elements to amplify your SEO strategy: 

• Intuitive navigation/accessibility.
• Easy-to-read content
• Mobile-friendly design
• Visual elements of website design
• Persuasive calls-to-action
• Keep load time in mind

If the website development process seems too overwhelming for you, then you can always seek website design and development services guidance. 

6. Take Care Of Technical SEO Aspects

Having excellent, compelling, and engaging content will help your website rank well. Still, if it is filled with technical SEO issues, you should quit considering ranking high, let alone anywhere in the first 5 Google pages. So SEO experts need to focus on On-site SEO and Off-site SEO, as this will help the search engine crawlers/indexers bot find your site quickly and search for indexing and ranking its various web pages easily & quickly. So here’s the checklist for your SEO technical elements:

• Check and fix crawl errors 
• Switch To HTTPS
• Create an XML sitemap
• Optimize Robots.txt
• Set your preferred domain 
• Optimize website navigation
• Add structured data markup
• Check your canonical URLs
• Find and fix broken links
• Use search engine-friendly URLs
• Boost website’s speed
• Make your site mobile friendly

7. Consider Your Resources

Search engine optimization impacts various other business sections, including marketing, sales, IT, etc. If you’re thinking about the budget for performing SEO, you might have a few of your employees who are already knowledgeable in order to help you. 

For instance, your sales personnel might know which products or services people are most curious about. Incorporating them when developing an SEO strategy will help you generate leads and attract new customers.

In the same way, SEO can also help you explain to your marketing personnel what type of content matches best so that they can adjust their campaigns accordingly. Your graphic designers and copywriting team can help you create the kind of content that will support you in increasing your rankings. 

Your IT team might already control your website. Thus, always design your SEO strategy surrounding their expertise in order to ensure the best website design and development cycles, data structures, basic principles, etc., are properly aligned. There’s no need to begin completely from scratch; just follow these steps:

• Analyze current software and technology
• Evaluate personnel
• Evaluate budget

8. Build High-Quality Backlinks

Link building process can make or break your strategies for SEO; Google search defines backlinks as “links to your website using your keywords or keyword phrases from the other website over the web that has the same theme or similar content topic as your own website.” Therefore, backlinks are not only an essential part of SEO, but they are very crucial to help your web in ranking high, boosting your website’s viewability, and they also drive organic traffic to your web. So how do you get backlinks from a high page rank website or blog that are not a paid link? Follow these principles to build and get high-quality backlinks:

• Blog commenting to similar site/blog
• Write relevant, detailed, and competitive content
• Share links on social media site
• Create an infographic or original image
• Link externally and then reach out

9. Track & Trace Your SEO Progress

A data-driven, tracking approach to your strategies for SEO is the way ahead to get the maximum result out of it. This ensures you know what initiatives are bringing results and what is not and helps you avoid wasting your marketing budget. If you want to keep track of your website’s search engine rankings, then you also need to track the progress of your SEO campaigns and prepare SEO reports out of it. Use various SEO progress tools like Google Analytics, SEMrush, MonsterInsights, or even Social Media Insights to know your website’s performance across all search engines and improve along the way to stay relevant and ahead of everyone else.

1. Improve The Crawlability Of Your Website

The crawlers are specialized bots that browse, index, evaluate and rank new webpages on the internet; they go through the link to link, URL to URL in order to bring the data to the search engine’s central servers so that it can be integrated into Google’s database. So when you improve the crawalibility of your website, it means how easy you have made it for any search engine to process the content on your website without running into a broken or dead end. Simply speaking, the more complicated it is for search engines to navigate your site to determine your rank, the poorer you will rank and will be harder to find. So focus on having clear, readable, and easily accessible content on your website for readers, search engines, and their robots. 

2. Focus on Properly Categorizing Your Pages

Site structure is another element that influences your SEO strategy, so you need to pay attention to how you structure your website. Many sites lack a decent structure to guide visitors to the product or services they’re looking for, leading to them exiting the site.

This is not just from a user’s perspective. Still, suppose you want your content to be located by Google. In that case, you should adequately categorize your pages as this “guides” Google (and Google searchers) to a specific direction when they find your content in the search engine. It’d be better to treat your category pages like your landing pages; it’s all about a user's intent, usability, and findability, which will also help your SEO strategy.

3. Utilize Social Media Platforms

Though social shares have no direct impact on search engine rankings, one cannot ignore the benefits of social media marketing. Social shares play a crucial role in helping you get your content in front of a larger audience all at once. So when the audience gets your content and shares it through multiple social media channels, it generates social signals or “waves,” telling that your post or content is helpful to your target market, and they are expanding your exposure via social shares. So utilize top social media platforms, especially Facebook & Instagram, for maximum.

4. Leverage The Popularity Of Influencers

Just like Social Media platforms, the impact of using influencer marketing on SEO is not immediate, but it is there, and it runs for the longer term. Influencer marketing is basically you partnering with an individual who is well-known and respected within his or her niche and has a solid social media footing. Influencer marketing helps your rankings by generating authoritative links, increasing user engagement, online traffic, and visibility to your brand since they have a band of fans that follow them religiously. So even if their content about your brand is sponsored, their followers will listen to them and may go for their recommendations.